The New York Film Festival had me waiting in a packed Walter Reade Theater for No Other Choice to start, the new film from the viscerally stylized popular Korean auteur Park Chan-wook. A pair of old people sitting behind me were greeted by a third press person of advanced age. The seated pair were at their first of the night, and the interloper described the films before. “The Petzold and The Mastermind were pretty thin,” he told them, “but Late Fame was wonderful.” Being in a room with a lot of established people, many of which I disagree with whole-heartedly on the matters of cinema in front of us, added a lot to the funny feeling that I somehow snuck into the theater.
Miroirs No. 3 by Christian Petzold, the second film I’ve seen from the German director (the first his 2008 The Postman Always Rings Twice adaptation Jerichow), is a stunning novella-esque almost-ghost story, wherein a woman gets into a car crash that kills her boyfriend, and she’s rescued by a mysteriously solitary older woman in the countryside. Petzold’s haunting precision spins a quick, illusive drama in a space on the fringes of nature, society, and domesticity (any film which explores a porch gets points in my book). Kelly Reichardt’s latest, too, has a genre spin to it, something of a heist film in its first half and a late-Bresson in its second. It’s her most playful and genuinely fun movie since her debut River of Grass, and then starts to slip into a wandering Rust Belt wreckage that our contemporary post-industrial malaise is born from, all anchored with a fantastically pathetic performance by Josh O’Connor.
Meanwhile, film critic-turned-filmmaker Kent Jones’ Late Fame is a movie where Willem Dafoe charmingly plays a poet so unappreciated that he’s spent half his life working in the post office, only to be rediscovered by a group of Manhattanite hipster literati. It’s the kind of concept that feels written by a film student (not to mention how it’s shot and edited like a 22-year-old’s capstone project), and yet the heartwarming tale of forgotten talent and fraudulent young people resonates much more with the older critic crowd than the films that try to address the present condition or how we got here, explorations which to them aren’t worth much more than a shrug.
No Other Choice did cover into the present mania of capitalism, following a paper company manager trying desperately to hold onto his family and childhood home after being laid off. Being a Park film, it's far from being a neorealist drama. Rather, No Other Choice is a rip-roaring farce, a comedy of work and marriage-based emasculation. The film follows You Man-soo (played by South Korean star Lee Byung-hun) as he plots to kill all the top papermen in country that could potentially get a job ahead of him. I can’t speak to the quality of the source material (Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax) or the 2005 Costa-Gavras adaptation that preceded it, but Park’s latest, despite its high highs, runs uneven. It’s usually not a good sign when a film feels like it’s reaching a natural denouement, only to check my watch and find there’s still another hour left. It’s hard to be too harsh, though, as there are still plenty of great moments in that final 60 minutes, including a strong thesis on what tech has done to labor and the social fabric. My reaction falls in line with the mixed reception in the room. Perhaps I find myself in the consensus after all, even if it’s only in ambivalence.